TIPS & TRICKS: 100% CPU and spoolsv.exe

As soon as your Windows XP machine boots up, you find that the CPU cycles (from Task Manager) reaches 100% and slows the machine to a crawl. Under Processes you see that the culprit is a service called spoolsv.exe. This process is a necessary process that helps send print jobs to a printer.

Before we say that this problem is due to a virus, take a look at all your print queues in Printers & Faxes. Look for any print jobs sitting in any of the queues that have errors in them. Delete those print jobs if you don't need them. These print jobs are the likely cause of the 100% CPU utilization.

Next make sure that none of the print queues are shared out on your computer. Usually, you can determine this by seeing if there is a hand under the printer icon. If there is a hand, right click on the printer icon and choose Sharing. Disable print sharing. This is necessary because this prevents other users on your local network from accidentally printing to the queues on your computer.

Finally, there is a possibility that the spoolsv.exe service could be harboring a virus. That's another tip. For now try this. Good luck.

TIPS & TRICKS: Error in trying update Windows XP after installing Microsoft Update

Here's the error message I received:

"The website has encountered a problem and cannot display the page you are trying to view..."

Apparently, there are many error codes that might go along with it. It will show to the upper right of the above message. There may be other issues on the machine generating the error, including firewall issues and other blocks. But, the fix that worked for me was using the ipconfig /flushdns command.

Here's how to run it...

- Hit Start
- Click on Run
- Type "cmd" in the Run dialogue box
- When the command window comes up, type ipconfig /flushdns at the command prompt and hit enter
- Close the command window

Try running Windows Update (or Microsoft Update) again. Good luck.

TIPS & TRICKS: FAT32, HFS+, and Copying Files

Sometimes I feel the need to go run into a wall. In attempting to backup a PowerMac G4 to an external HD, I found that I encountered errors in copying. The biggest annoyance with drag and drop method of backing up files on any system is poorly named files and folders. On both Mac OS and Windows, when such files and folders are encountered the OS stops the copying process and doesn't back up anything beyond the problematic file/folder. Often times I'd love for it to just skip the file and continue copying. I'd much rather have most everything and miss one file then skipping all those files.

The first problem I came across in OS X.3 were file names that containted a foward slash ("/"). Some OSs understand this character as part of a path to a location (i.e. HD/You Folder/Another Folder/A File.doc). This can be fixed with just renaming the file/folder by removing the character. In fact, there are utilites out there, depending on your OS, can help you find all those potential naming problems and fix them before the copy process. I've never used one because the problems I've run across are relatively small in number and can be done by hand.

The second problem that caused me some frustration was not quite as obvious. The error message I received was:

"You cannot copy the item Icon... because the name is too long or includes characters that the disk cannot display"

I kept going through files trying to find the culprit file and removing it. Needless to say, there were too many. It was not going to work with the previous method of renaming the file. However, I was on the wrong path all together. What I finally got around to figuring out was that the external HD I was using was formatted FAT32, instead of the Mac OS HFS+ format.

After I found another drive and reformatted it for exclusive use on Mac OS, everything copied over without a hitch. The problem really resided in that I keep my drives formatted FAT32 because I want to be able to use it across both Mac OS and Windows. However, some files in Mac OS just won't copy properly onto FAT32 to prevent problems.

Moral of the story, pay attention to the source as well as the destination.